Alexander Woollcott by Wolcott Gibbs

from Backwards Ran Sentences:
Charles Brackett, a devoted admirer, described him in one of his novels as "a competent old horror with a style that combined clear treacle and pure black bile," while Harpo Marx spoke of his idol considered sheerly as an artist. "He is just a big dreamer;" said Mr. Marx, "with a good sense of double-entry bookkeeping." Elsie Janis's mother, struggling to define the effect that Mr. Woollcott has on people who aren't altogether used to him, said that in many ways he was like a fine old olive, and S. N. Behr-man, who twice permitted him to play himself on the stage, caused one of his heroines to express herself crossly. "Oh, Sig, Sig," she cried, "if you'd been a woman, what a bitch you would have made!" Back in 1921, George Jean Nathan wrote a scurrilous article about him in the Smart Set entitled "The Seidlitz Powder of Times Square," and once, Howard Dietz, afflicted by prose more beautiful than he could bear, called him Louisa M. Woollcott, thus speaking for thousands who had also been troubled without ever quite knowing what was the matter with them. These tributes for the most part have come from the more articulate of the eight hundred. The rest have usually contented themselves with describing him simply and passionately as a monster, or at the very least as a man of absurdly mixed ancestry. The caricaturists have also been severe, which is probably un-grateful of them, for Mr. Woollcott is a persistently obliging model, one wartime associate on the Stars and Stripes, the A.E.F. weekly newspaper, even hinting that he was by no means above using his sergeant's chevrons to compel gifted privates to draw pictures of him. His face, of course, could not have been more helpfully designed for their purposes. Florence Atwater, one of Booth Tarkington's darkly observant little girls, once came close to his total effect, al-though at the time she was speaking of her grandfather's cook. "Her face is sort of small," she said, wrestling with the inexpressible, "but the other parts of her head are terribly wide." Mr. Woollcott's small features occupy the front part of a head which is at least wider than most. He has a rather beaked nose and a tight mouth and a negligible mustache, all closely grouped. His eyes are made strange and fierce by thick glasses. A clever child could easily draw him and, as a matter of fact, many have, although usually under the impression that they were turning out owls.
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It has also called forth a certain amount of criticism, a few serious thinkers being of the opinion that Mr. Woollcott's interests are rather peripheral, to put it mildly. There have been moments of embarrassment when his proteges have backfired on him.
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He loves Neshobe as proudly and jealously as young Bonaparte loved Corsica. The island is a perpetual source of wonder to the simple Ver-mont natives who circumnavigate it cautiously in motorboats and observe the inmates, who are frequently to be seen lying like seals along the rocky shore. The general opinion apparently is that Ne-shobe is a sort of Hollywood nudist camp, and this leads to odd con-fusions. Thornton Wilder has been mistaken for Jack Benny, and MacArthur, sun-bathing in the nude, was once pleased to hear him-self identified as Irving Berlin and sang "All Alone" loud and clear in gratitude. A few years ago, Mr. Woollcott himself, inadequately wrapped in a dressing gown and wearing a limp, enormous straw hat, was reading one day on the dock when a boatload of sightseers drifted by. Their voices came to him quite plainly over the water. "Who on earth is that?" he heard one lady cry in startled and even rather horrified tones. "I'm not sure," said another voice doubtfully, "but I think it's Marie Dressler."

Steiglitz by Janet Malcolm

Steiglitz almost single-handedly dislodged photography from its position at the turn of the century as a kind of genteel hobby, and propelled it directly into the mainstream of modern art. This achievement was carried out in two stages, buttressed by two ideas. At the time, the most advanced photographers were modelling their work on Symbolist, Impressionist, and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and Stieglitz's first move (in 1902.) was to give this tendency a name—the Photo-Secession. Like Lawrence Alloway's coinage "Pop Art," the label gave definition and direction to something that was not all that definite and direct, and provided both practitioners and public with a point of departure. Today, the Photo-Secession is largely viewed as a misguided attempt to make photography an art form by turning it into a bastard form, and in the light of sub-sequent achievements—by Strand, Evans, Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson, and other modern masters—the portentous, misty landscapes and the blurred, symbolic portraits (achieved by out-of-focus lenses and manipulated negatives and prints) of sad, gowned women [4] and marmoreal, naked children look strained and enervated. But if one goes back to the photography before the Photo-Secession—to the ludicrous anecdotal "art photographs" like Rejlander's "The Two Ways of Life", and to the boring geography-book pictures of foreign cities and landscapes—the pictorial school assumes its proper significance. Although photography soon went "straight" (i.e., photographers put their lenses back into focus and stopped scratching their negatives and smearing their prints with gum bichromate), it has retained the pictorial formalism brought to it by the Photo-Secessionists. What has changed is the literal-ness of photography's relationship to painting: photographs no longer exhibit the surface qualities of paintings and drawings. But they do retain paintings' formalism, which Stieglitz saw, correctly, as the key to photography's liberation from its mechanical basis and its transformation into an art. His own early photographs--alive and spontaneous in a way that none of his contemporaries could match—invariably displayed this quality in its strictest application. Pictorial formalism as a pre-requisite for all else was the real Lesson of the Master. Stieglitz's second, and truly extraordinary, idea was that of showing the most advanced painting and sculpture of the day at the gallery he had rented at 291 Fifth Avenue to display the work of the Photo-Secessionists Picasso, Cezanne, Picabia, Rodin, Brancusi, Marin, Hartley, Dove, Maurer, and O'Keeffe were among the artists (then almost unknown in America) that Stieglitz began showing a good eight years before the Armory Show of 1913 "brought" modern art to America. During most of its existence, 291 was the only place in New York where modern art was regularly exhibited, and Stieglitz's pioneering in this regard has been widely acknowledged. What has been insufficiently acknowledged is the importance for photography that lay in the hanging of strange and difficult abstractions alongside the Whistler-like and Redon-like Photo-Secession works. This established photography's association with mod-ernism, which we now take for granted but which was scarcely a historical necessity. It was, rather, a historical accident—the fact that a man of Stieglitz's extraordinary intellectual forward-ness (his personal forwardness is something else again) should have entered photography when he did, when there were com-bination photography-and-bicycling clubs and a museum would as soon have hung a potholder as a photograph. That the Museum of Modern Art formed a department of photography in 1940, that most museums now show photographs, and that an almost automatic interest in photography exists among people who consider themselves advanced—all this goes back to him. Stieglitz was born in 1864, in Hoboken, of German-Jewish parents, and he grew up in a well-to-do, culture-centered household in which, Miss Norman writes, "neither the question of 'being Jewish' nor the meaning of the term was dis-cussed." In 1881, his father decided that he had made enough money (four hundred thousand dollars) and took his wife and six children to Europe for an indefinite period. Alfred enrolled as a student of mechanical engineering at the Berlin Polytechnic, but soon washed out. One day, he saw a camera in a shop window and bought it; before long, he was studying photog-raphy at the Polytechnic with a professor of photo-chemistry named Herman Wilhelm Vogel. In 1887, he won first prize in a "holiday work" competition of the London Amateur Photogra-pher for a picture he took in Italy and called "A Good Joke." The judge was Peter Henry Emerson, one of the earliest of out-of-focus pictorialists and a champion of the idea of photogra-phy as an art form (but who, in a curious reversal, suddenly changed his mind, declaring in 1891, in a black-bordered pam-phlet entitled The Death of Naturalistic Photography, that photography "must always rank the lowest of all the arts," adding, "I deeply regret that I have come to this conclusion"). In 1887, however, Emerson was still enamored of photography, and he was so impressed with Stieglitz's work that he wrote and told him that his entries were the only good ones in the entire competition.
and
Here and there in Stieglitz's writings one gets a whiff of the hidden connection, and in one place—an account of the circumstances under which he took his great photograph "The Steerage"—one feels that one has almost grasped it. He begins with characteristic pettishness:
In June 1907 my wife, our daughter Kitty, and I sailed for Europe. My wife insisted on going on a large ship, fashionable at the time. Our initial destination was Paris. How distasteful I found the atmosphere of first class on that ship, especially since it was impossible to escape the nouveaux riches. I sat in my steamer chair much of the time the first days out with closed eyes. In this way it became possible to avoid seeing faces that gave me the cold shivers. But those strident voices. Ye gods!
Stieglitz presently gets up and takes a walk on the deck. Then, happening to glance down into the steerage, he sees his great picture:
The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle. I stood spellbound for a while. I saw shapes related to one another—a picture of shapes and, under-lying it, a new vision that held me: simple people; the feeling of ship, ocean, sky; a sense of release that I was away from the mob called "rich." Rembrandt came into my mind and I wondered would he have felt as I did.
Stieglitz was able to race back to his cabin, grab his camera, and take the picture (God is good to artists: no one had moved) that is one of photography's masterpieces [7]. The peripatetic account of its creation—the abrupt transformation of the languid snob into the super-artist--is one of art history's illuminations.

Backwards Ran Sentences: on Beebe

When Lucius Beebe came to the Herald Tribune from the Boston Transcript, in June, 1929, he was twenty-seven years old, six feet four inches tall, and weighed in the neighborhood of a hundred and eighty pounds. His blond hair was closely cropped, and he looked strongly Germanic, like an especially rubicund officer in the Potsdam Guard. When he was introduced to Stanley Walker, the city editor, he said “sir” in a tone of booming deference, to the grateful amazement of the Tribune staff, which was not itself inclined to be punctilious.

Mr. Walker had never seen a reporter of such baroque design, but he was no man to recoil from the unknown, and he hired Beebe for thirty-five dollars a week. Thus began a career which may be tritely described as unique in American journalism, although it can never be said that Mr. Beebe was much of a reporter. He had an apathy about facts which verged closely on actual dislike, and the tangled wildwood of his prose was poorly adapted to describing small fires and negligible thefts. His splendid plumage and a certain jovial condescension in his manner were probably a source of either terror or indignation to the homely citizens who provide the bulk of routine news. We hear of him, in a top hat and opera cape, arriving fashionably late for the annual dinner of the Landscape Gardening Society, and there is a story that he attended a fire in a morning coat.

Nor was he always very clear about his assignments. Told to cover a banquet of the New York Central Railroad Engineers, he appeared somehow at one sponsored by the Caledonian Club, and after lingering only long enough to get a prepared copy of the principal speech, went back to his office to report that the President of the Central had incomprehensibly chosen to talk to his men about Scotland. He was astonished by the clamor which the publication of this item aroused, being clearly of the opinion that one damn dull dinner was very much like another.

The Girls of Slender Means

 Many strange arms were twined round strange bodies. Many liaisons, some permanent, were formed in the night, and numerous infants of experimental variety, delightful in hue of skin and racial structure, were born to the world in the due cycle of nine months after. The bells pealed. Greggie observed that it was something between a wedding and a funeral on a world scale. The next day everyone began to consider where they personally stood in the new order of things. Many citizens felt the urge, which some began to indulge, to insult each other, in order to prove something or to test their ground. The government reminded the public that it was still at war. Officially this was undeniable, but except to those whose relations lay in the Far Eastern prisons of war, or
were stuck in Burma, that war was generally felt to be a remote affair. A few shorthand-typists at the May of Teck Club started to apply for safer jobs—that is to say, in private concerns, not connected with the war like the temporary Ministries where many of them had been employed. Their brothers and men-friends in the forces, not yet de-mobilised, by a long way, were talking of vivid enterprises for the exploitation of peace, such as buying a lorry and building up from it a transport business.

from the novel by Muriel Spark.

How spare this is and pinned together with articles of faith and suggestions of grace earned, evil salted in youth and what I imagine is supposed to be spasmodic holiness. Absolutely inchoately devout, her sentences ring with dispassionate observation. That combination is unnerving.... but the taut length and her playful plot make the novel buoyant and memorable.

Spinoza/ Liebnitz from the marvelous Matthew Stewart

 Possibly Hegel provides the most useful guidance on the matter: "Leibniz's philosophy appears like a string of arbitrary assertions, which follow one another like a metaphysical romance," he acknowledges. "It is only when we see what he wished thereby to avoid that we learn to appreciate its value." There is in fact a single thread that may lead one safely through the labyrinth of the monadology. The astonishing and bizarre features of the monads—the windowlessness, the pregnancies, the splotchy mirrors, the infinite replications of the infinite universe, and the pre-established harmony—all follow with admirable logical rigor from the premise that substantiality (i.e., absolute unity, self-identity, freedom, and permanence) is a quality of individual minds, and not of nature as a whole. What Leibniz is for is often difficult to grasp; but what he is against fits neatly into one word: Spinoza.
Salvation
Leibniz, like Spinoza, finds happiness in the love of God. But, as the two philosophers have very different ideas about the nature of both God and love, they inevitably arrive at very different destinations on their respective journeys to salvation. According to Spinoza virtue is its own reward. Therefore, the question of personal immortality can have no bearing on our salvation, for the wise man has no need of additional rewards in a purported afterlife to justify virtue in this life. Leibniz, on the other hand, takes the more usual view that in this life, at least, virtue often goes unrewarded, and evil often goes unpunished. Belief in the immortality of the soul, he argues, is therefore essential if we are to have faith that the calculus of rewards and punishments in the universe will ever add up to justice. The doctrine of personal immortality is thus vital to our happiness. Indeed, says Leibniz, Spinoza's attack on the doctrine of personal immortality, if successful, can serve only to bring great misery to the human race. (It is curious to note once again that, accord-ing to the logic of Leibniz's arguments, it is the belief in and not the fact of immortality that matters for our happiness. Even if the soul were mortal, we could still find a Leibnizian kind of bliss, provided we were able to convince ourselves otherwise.)

The difference between Leibniz and Spinoza on happiness, as on all subjects, comes down to their different attitudes toward God. For Spinoza, the intellectual love of God is the highest form of reason. But, as we know, this brainy love is not of the kind that can be returned. Spinoza's Substance is utterly indifferent to humanity's concerns. For Leibniz, on the other hand, the only love worthy of the name is the kind that promises punctual and copious repayment. Spinoza's unrequited love of God, Leibniz maintains, is in fact unreasonable:
Spinoza thinks that the mind can be greatly strengthened if it understands that what happens, happens necessarily. But the animus of the sufferer is not rendered content through his compul-sion, nor does it feel evils any the less on that account. The soul is happy if it understands that good follows from evil, and that what happens is for the best if we have wisdom.
In the Theodicy he adds that Spinozistic dogmas concerning the "brutish" necessity of things "destroy the confidence in God that gives us tranquility, the love of God that makes our happiness." His own doctrines, by contrast, guarantee that God does everything with our good in mind, and thus they give us the happiness and tranquil-ity we need. The crucial difference between the two philosophers comes down to this: Spinoza finds happiness in loving God; Leibniz finds it in God loving us back. (Or, again, more precisely, Leibniz finds happiness in the belief that God loves us back.)

and

When Leibniz submitted a condensed version of his Discourse on Metaphysics to Antoine Arnauld in 1686, his hopes were high that Protestants and Catholics would soon be taking communion together in a universal church. But Arnauld handed Leibniz a humiliating set-back. To Count Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels, who served as mediator in the discussion, the theologian offered this assessment of Leibniz's metaphysics: "I find in these thoughts so many things which terrify me, and which all men, if I, am not mistaken, will find so shocking, that I do not see of what use such a writing can be, which all the world will reject." Arnauld's primary initial concern had to do with Leibniz's concept of freedom of the will, or lack thereof. If "ate the apple" is a necessary predicate of"Adam" for all eternity,Arnauld rea-soned, then Adam was not really free; and if he was not free, he did not sin; and if he did not sin, there is no church. Leibniz wrote back immediately to defend himself from such dire
accusations.
 Rebuffed by Arnauld, he raised his sights to one of the most powerful figures in the Catholic world of the time, Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, the Bishop of Meaux. Bossuet was Louis XIV's premier spir-itual adviser. He was dour, severe, and neither unfamiliar with nor averse to the pleasures of exercising immense political power. He was just then articulating the ideological foundations for the expulsion of the Huguenots, in which hundreds of thousands of the French Protestants were tortured, raped, murdered, and otherwise induced to leave their homes, all at great expense to French economy and soci-ety, but to the profound satisfaction of the King and his counselor, who at last saw their nation united under a single church. Bossuet's intellectual contributions to his country included a book in which he used extensive citations from the New Testament to demonstrate that the rule of Louis XIV was ordained by God. In between acts of eth-nic cleansing and scholarly tasks, the Bishop took time to campaign against the new opera in Paris—a form of entertainment that, he was convinced, involved putting Satan's words to music. As Bossuet was a rather busy man, Leibniz corresponded mainly with a circle close to the Bishop: the French theologian Pelisson, who published an argument in favor of the infallibility of the pope; the Abbess of Maubuisson, who happened to be Princess Sophia's sister; and Marie de Brinon, a former schoolmistress and the secretary to the Abbess. According to Sophia, Brinon was extraordinarily elo-quent—for she never stopped talking. The topic of the day was heresy. Specifically, Leibniz needed to know whether the Catholics planned to stick to the decree made in the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century to the effect that Protestants were heretics. Seven years, of correspondence and a num-ber of lengthy manifestos concerning the nature of heresy spilled from Leibniz's plume before he understood that his interlocutors had no interest in negotiating the Catholic Church's right to make infallible judgments concerning just who would or would not count as a heretic.

and finally

Now imagine that your friends are named Leibniz and Spin-oza, and that instead of a particular city they are discussing the nature of the universe. The question then is: Do they share the same philos-ophy? Or, in other words, is philosophy about what you see, or the way you see it?

It is a startling fact that Spinoza considered and rejected something very like Leibniz's transcendent concept of God before the two philosophers met. In a letter dating from 1674, Spinoza writes: "He who affirms that God could have refrained from creating the world is declaring in an indirect way that it was made by chance, since it pro-ceeded from an act of will which might not have been. Since this belief and this view is quite absurd, it is commonly and unanimously admitted that God's will is eternal and has never been indifferent." The idea that God has the option not to create the world, of course, is a defining feature of Leibniz's concept of divinity. Spinoza's critique of that concept begins with a premise with which Leibniz must agree: that God must have reasons for what it does. When God creates the world, Spinoza therefore infers, it cannot do so by whim or accident, but because some reason compels it to do so. Since that reason is always there—it is "eternal"—then it is "quite absurd," as Spinoza puts it, to speak of God as having the option not to create the world. Spinoza's comments on a proto-Leibnizian concept of God antic-ipate a set of criticisms later offered by others in direct response to Leibniz. The debate boils down to a simple question: Does Leibniz's God really have a choice? Many have argued that he does not. Leib-niz seems to add fuel to the fire under his feet with comments such as "everything [is] settled in advance" and "God's decree [to actualize the best of all possible worlds] is immutable." A version of the critique runs like this: How do we know that this is the best of all possible worlds? It cannot be because we observe it to be so—for, to sift through all possible worlds and rank them according to their merits requires the kind of omniscience that only God has. It must therefore be because the choice of the best of all possible worlds follows from God's nature. In other words, God chooses the best of all possible worlds because it is in his nature to be good. God could not do otherwise because if he did so he would not be good, and therefore he would not be God. But this implies that God does not have a choice at all. He must create this world, exactly as it is, if he is to deserve the name of God.
At this point in the argument, of course, the mature Leibniz would concede that a transcendent God must have a sufficient reason fo his actions. But, the author of the Theodicy would add, the reason for this world is a "moral" one and not a "metaphysical" one; specifically, it is the "principle of the best," to which God appeals in justifying his decision to create the world. Unfortunately for Leibniz, Spinoza has already anticipated this response. People like Leibniz, he sneers ii the Ethics,
seem to posit something external to God that does not depend upon him, to which in acting God looks as if it were a model, or to which he aims, as if it were a fixed target. This is surely to subject God to fate; and no more absurd suggestion can be made about God, whom we have shown to be the first and only free cause of both the essence and the existence of things. So I need not spend any more time in refuting this absurdity.
Leibniz's God, according to Spinoza, is not a free agent, but rather is beholden to some preconceived idea about the good—"a fixed tar get." More generally, Spinoza's point is that Leibniz's transcendent Go is not a God of reason, for it must act in some arbitrary way, accordin to externally presented criteria over which it has no control.The onl way out for those who believe in a God of reason, Spinoza implies, is to regard the "good" for which God allegedly aims as something inter nal to God's own nature. But this, of course, would be to accept a vet sion of Spinoza's own concept of an immanent deity and reject the very idea that God chooses among possible worlds. Spinoza's implicit critique of the distinction between "moral necessity" and "metaphysical necessity" was made quite explicit by Leibniz's later critics. In his exchange with Leibniz, for example, Samuel Clarke argues that "necessity, in philosophical questions, always signifies absolute necessity; hypothetical necessity and moral necessity are only figurative ways of speaking." The twentieth-century philosopher Arthur Lovejoy is even blunter: "The distinction Leibniz her attempts to set up [between moral necessity and brute metaphysic necessity] is manifestly without logical substance; the fact is so apparent that it is impossible to believe that a thinker of his powers can have been altogether unaware of it himself." But a good indication that the matter here runs much deeper than a simple logical error is that the literature is also not short of scholars willing to defend Leib-niz's distinction. The trouble with Leibniz's transcendent God, expressed in the most general terms, concerns the very nature of the choice Leibniz asks God to make. Leibniz often seems to imply that God's choice is something like the selection of an entree from a menu of dishes. But, in fact, the nature of the choice God makes is very different from that faced by the typical restaurant patron. It is not a choice between this and that, but between something and nothing—or, more precisely, between anything at all and absolutely nothing. God's choice must take place outside, before, or beyond this (or ariy other possible) world. And yet it must be a rational choice; that is, it must involve comparing possible options and maximizing preferences. The ques-tion that troubles Leibniz's more acute critics is: Is such a transcen-dental choice conceivable? Is it possible to imagine a choice that takes place without also imagining a world within which to make it? Can you do it? Leibniz, it seems, could not. Indeed, in the Theodicy, he goes to the trouble of providing a detailed description of the "higher" world within which' God's transcendental choice is allegedly made—namely, the fabulous, pyramid-shaped palace of all possible worlds. We may prefer to imagine a different setting—say, we could picture God shuffling cards in a weighty game of cosmic solitaire, or stopping in for a treat at a cosmic diner. Spinoza, for his part, had Leibniz's God either sculpting from a model or firing arrows at a bull's-eye. In any case, it seems impossible not to imagine some sort of scenario within which God's transcendental choice occurs. The question then arises: Who created this higher world? Who constructed that beautiful, baroque pyramid, the green felt card table, the bow and arrow—i.e., all the constraints, norms, and preferences according to which all pos-sible worlds are defined and judged? If we say that this higher world is God's creation, too, then we seem to acknowledge that there is only one possible world from which God may choose—namely, this higher world—and all the so-called possible worlds aren't really "worlds" at all, but merely features of the one true world created by God, like the blocks of a pyramid. At the end of that road lies Spinozism. If we say that this higher world has always been there and has always been the way it is, on the other hand, then we make God one of its creatures and we subject God to its rules, and he acts unfreely—i.e., according to its nature and not his own. In a sense, God is no longer God, but just a logical operator within the scheme of some preexisting nature. At the end of that road lies atheism—or, one could say, a form of Spinozism without Spin-oza's belief in the divinity of nature. Indeed, some such charge is what Spinoza implicitly levels at Leib-niz. The label of "fatalism" that Spinoza hurls against (people like) Leibniz, ironically, is the same that Leibniz tosses at Spinoza in his later works. Had Spinoza lived long enough, he might have accused Leibniz of being a godless Spinozist after clarifying that he himself was not one. Perhaps the most curious feature of Spinoza's implicit critique of Leibniz, though, is its tone. Spinoza's dismissal of a proto-Leibnizian concept of God as utterly absurd hardly suggests much room for negotiation on the subject from Spinoza's end. Indeed, his contemptuous treatment of the idea offers an intriguing clue as to how he might have responded if and when Leibniz let slip his com-mitment to it when they met in 1676.
Mind
One might have hoped that Leibniz's theory of mind, as represented in his monadology, would lead us safely out of this labyrinth of Spin-ozistic Leibnizes and Leibnizian Spinozas. The monads, after all, are where Leibniz draws his line in the sand: Spinoza would be correct, if there were no monads. But this line in the sand turns out to be something of a mirage, too. Leibniz's readers have frequently complained that the monads belong to a thoroughly deterministic cosmos, in which history unwinds like the ticking of a second hand through eternity. Aril uld —oddly echoing Spinoza—accuses Leibniz of propounding a view
"more than fatalistic." "Once [God] has chosen," Leibniz acknowl-edges, once again adding fuel to the fire, "one must grant that every-thing is included in his choice, and that nothing can be changed." Life in Leibniz's world, practically speaking, would seem to be indistin-guishable from life in Spinoza's world. Leibniz, of course, responds that the monads' ignorance of their own true nature requires that they act as if they were free. That is, God knows Caesar will cross the Rubicon, but when Caesar stands on the banks of the river, he faces a momentous decision. Thus, Cae-sar, like the rest of us, has free will. The best reason to think that Leib-niz's argument in favor of free will is as bad as it sounds is that it is indistinguishable from Spinoza's argument against free will. This sur-prising coincidence is evident in a moment when Leibniz lets down his guard and speaks frankly. The will, he says, "has its causes, but since we are ignorant of them and they are oft-hidden, we believe we our-selves independent. . . . It is this chimera of imaginary independence which revolts us against the consideration of determinism, and which brings us to believe that there are difficulties where there are none." These words could have been simply lifted out of the Ethics, where Spinoza writes that "men believe they are free . . . because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, yet ignorant of the causes that have determined them to desire and will." Leibniz was—and, at least in the privacy of his personal notebooks, understood himself to be—a determinist. Of course, it is possible to be a determinist and still not be a Spin-ozist, and, at first glance, that is precisely the niche that Leibniz seems to want to occupy. Spinoza's determinism is closely linked to his doc-trine of parallelism, according to which mind and body pursue par-allel paths through life because they are the same thing viewed from different perspectives. Spinoza's determinism, in other words, trans-lates into the claim that all of our mental acts may ultimately be mapped into physical processes, which themselves operate necessarily according to laws of cause and effect. Leibniz's determinism, on the other hand, arises from within the mind itself, and not from interac-tion between mind and body, for he allows no such interaction. That is, it is because all predicates are contained within the concept of a monad that it follows a predetermined path through life. According to the doctrine of pre-established harmony, mind and body move in parallel only because God has seen fit to harmonize the predeter-mined activities of independent mind- and body-substances, and not because they are two attributes of the same substance. While the theoretical difference between Spinoza's parallelism and Leibniz's pre-established harmony is easy to understand, however, the practical implications of this difference are much harder to see. How, one should ask, might a neutral observer detect whether he happened to be in a Leibnizian universe rather than a Spinozan one? In both cases, after all, every mental act without exception occurs alongside a corresponding physical event. As a matter of principle, there would be no way to establish through any observation whether this apparent unity of mind and body is the consequence of an underlying iden-tity, as Spinoza suggests, or an amazing coincidence, as Leibniz argues. As early as 1712, and then again in the 1720s, Leibniz's critics said flatly that there was no way to tell the difference. In fact, they said, Leibniz's pre-established harmony is a plagiarism of Spinoza's doc-trine of parallelism. Leibniz, of course, insists all over again that his form of parallelism is different because, whether we observe so or not, it occurs by the will of God, not through the common identity of mind and body in substance. But, unfortunately, this approach does not forestall the col-lapse into Spinozism for long. The pre-established harmony is the prime example of a choice that, according to Leibniz, is "morally" necessary but not "metaphysically" necessary. God has the metaphys-ical option, Leibniz implies, to create a disharmonious universe, even if it is morally incumbent upon him to favor a harmonious one. If, however, Leibniz's distinction between "moral" and "metaphysical" necessity is specious, then we would have to conclude that the pre-established harmony follows necessarily (tout court) from the nature of God, and that the parallelism in Leibniz's world is every bit as logi-cally necessary as that which obtains in Spinoza's world. Supposing we allow Leibniz the distinction between moral and metaphysical necessity, the question still remains: Is a "disharmo-nious" universe metaphysically possible, as he implies? According to
Leibniz's principle that One is All, each individual monad entails the entire existing universe of monads, in the sense that its internal "mirror" replicates the activities of all the other monads, no matter how many or how far. Choose one monad, in other words, and you choose the entire universe. In a disharmonious universe, however, the "universe" within each monad would have nothing to do with the "universe" outside. A mind-monad might be in Paris, for instance, while its body is in Hanover (or, better, nowhere at all—for there is no obvious sense in which the body a monad thinks it has should refer to any outside monad at all). Choose two or more monads, in other words, and you choose two or more universes that have noth-ing to do with one another. But, if monads belong to universes that have nothing to do with one another, then they cannot be conceived of as belonging to the same universe. Even God, through whom all substances must be conceived, would not be able to imagine such dis-parate substances as belonging in any sense to the same universe. But if disharmonious monads do not belong to the same universe, then a disharmonious universe is not possible. And if a disharmonious uni-verse is not possible, then Leibniz's God has only harmonious possi-ble universes to choose from, which is to say that in all possible universes mind and body are harmonious, which is to say that the parallelism of mind and body exhibits just as much logical necessity in Leibniz's world as it does in Spinoza's. The dangerous and unexpected convergence of Leibniz's views on the mind-body relation with Spinoza's also raises a worrisome chal-lenge to his doctrine of personal immortality. To be sure, Leibniz ever and always avows his faith in personal immortality, and repeatedly chastises Spinoza and his proxies for their belief in "an immortality without memory" However, as a Consequence of his commitment to a form of parallelism, Leibniz is forced to acknowledge that even in its before- and after-lives, the mind-monad remains tied to some parallel manifestation of body-monads. Before life, roughly speaking, we are something like seeds; after life, we reside in microscopic form somewhere in the ashes, for example. As a further consequence of his own parallelism, Leibniz is compelled to acknowledge that our faculties of perception are greatly influenced by the kinds of body-monads with which we are surrounded. He hastens to add that even a mind-monad buried in a speck of ash will control some set of sub-ordinate body-monads, thus forming an organic structure. But, Leibniz's assurances about the fire-resistant properties of monads notwithstanding, many have found it difficult to believe that immor-tality as a cinder is all that it is cracked up to be. Perhaps understand-ably, the skeptics question whether the perceptive faculties of the average speck of ash may attain a degree of acuity sufficient to per-mit it to bask in the rewards or suffer the punishments that Leibniz insists must come its way in the course of its eternal afterlife. The implosion of the doctrine of immortality reflects an even deeper crisis in Leibniz's thought concerning the very idea of indi-viduality. In his effort to secure the absolute permanence and unity of the individual soul against all outside influence, Leibniz is forced to represent the body and all of its activities as the workings of an infinity of monads external to the individual mind-monad. The ques-tion then naturally arises: Why not ascribe to this outside infinity of monads all of the attributes that we use to define our identities—beginning with height and weight but not ending with our memo-ries, preferences, and passions? Instead of preserving the sanctity of the individual, Leibniz may be inadvertently engaged in a decon-struction of individuality itself—which, of course, is exactly what Spinoza accomplishes in his system. All of the suggestions that Leibniz is some sort of Spinozist can be mapped into the claim that monads are not true substances, as Leib-niz maintains, but rather something more like modes of a single Sub-stance. Leibniz himself acknowledges the centrality of the matter when he says that Spinoza would be right, if there were no monads. All of the challenges to the substantiality of monads in turn come down to a question about the relation between monads and God. In his metaphysical system, Leibniz strives to maintain a delicate balance between God and the monads. For example, he avers that monads are eternal and indestructible—as indeed substances must be—but then turns around and allows that God can create them or annihilate them all in a flash. He grants monads freedom in their own eyes—which is as it should be for all substances—but then seems to
take away their freedom in God's eyes.These and other tensions in the City of God come to a head in a simple question: Is God a monad? It would seem a straightforward question, the sort to which the great monadologist would have a ready answer.Yet Leibniz is surpris-ingly cagey on the subject. His best hint comes in the phrase that God is the "monad of monads." One would have thought that, after three centuries of effort, the Leibniz scholars would have reached a consensus on just what Leibniz means by "the monad of monads." But such is not the case. Some argue that God must be a monad, others that he cannot be. In fact, there is no answer that works within the constraints of the Leibnizian system. Consider the possibility that God is not a monad.This makes sense: since God chooses to "flash" the monads into existence, he must exist before the "flash." In that case, however, it follows that the monads exist and have their properties only in virtue of the properties and/or deeds of this flashing, nonmonadic entity. But if monads depend on some other entity in this way, then they are not substances, for a sub-stance by definition depends on nothing else to be what it is. Rather, the so-called monads must in fact be considered merely "modes" of substance. And since God is the only entity that does not depend on some other entity to be what it is, then God alone is substance. Hegel sums it up nicely: "There is a contradiction present. If the monad of monads, God, is the absolute substance, and individual monads are created through his will, their substantiality comes to an end." If God is not a monad, in short, then Leibniz is a Spinozist. Needless to say, Leibniz would now rush to open the other door. So, consider the option that "the monad of monads" is indeed a monad. But, if God is a monad, then by definition he cannot interact with other monads, for otherwise be would determine their essence and they his. If he cannot interact with them, he cannot create them. As a monad, in fact, God may have concourse with his so-called cre-ations only in a "virtual" way, by means of the pre-established harmony. If God acts only through the pre-established harmony, then he can't be said to create that either. And whatever it is that God does—if there is anything at all left for him to do—all of it follows with absolute, logical necessity from his monadic essence. That is, the fact that he will "create" this particular universe (if he can) is already contained within his concept, in the same way that "cross the Rubicon" is a necessary predicate of Caesar. Indeed given the lemma that to choose one monadis to choose its entire universe, it follows that once God exists, then the universe such as it is exists with rigorous neccessity except insofar as, like Caesar, he is ignorant of his true nature. In short, if God is a monad, he isn't God at all; he's just another one of us. Russell alludes to this eventuality when he remarks that Leibniz's monadism should have impelled him to an even greater heresy than Spinozism. To put it crudely: if God is a monad, Leibniz is an atheist.

Salvation
Those still hoping for a hard and fast distinction between the Leib-nizian and Spinozan philosophies might look forward to building the fence somewhere along the path to salvation. After all, it seems embarrassingly obvious from their different lifestyles, if nothing else, that the two philosophers represent very different ideas about the nature of human happiness. Unfortunately, the differences between the two on salvation turn out to be no less elusive than the putative differences between monads and modes. Leibniz's determinism inevitably draws him very close to Spinoza's ethical positions—and even opens him up to attack from the same, orthodox antagonists. For example, to the extent that God's decision to create the best of all possible worlds is "immutable," as Leibniz has it, then it would seem pointless to pray to him, just as it is pointless to pray to Spinoza's God in hopes of some alternative outcome of events. Inasmuch as everything a monad ever does is already contained within its concept, furthermore, then it would take a legalistic mind of tremendous power to demonstrate that monads commit sins of their own free will. Russell goes so far as to accuse Leibniz of"discreditable subterfuges" in his efforts to conceal the fact that all sin for him is "original sin, the inherent finitude of every created monad." Leibniz attempts to finesse the issue by suggesting, for example, that monads can choose to do good by guiding their efforts according to the "presumptive will" of God. Exactly how one goes about presuming God's will Leibniz leaves somewhat unclear; but a Spin-ozist would undoubtedly infer that the "presumptive will" of God is a metaphorical way of alluding to the realization of our own essential and inherently finite natures, for that is what forms our contribu-tion to the realization of God's plan for the universe. But this maximization of the individual conatus, of course, is precisely the path Spinoza proposes to take in his Ethics. Leibniz's tendency toward a Spinozism in ethics extends beyond his commitment to some form of determinism and penetrates into his very idea of self-realization, or happiness. Because it has a conatus of sorts, each monad wants to "become what it is," as it were; and any-thing that contributes to this project of perfecting the self counts as pleasure, whereas whatever detracts from it is pain. "Pleasure is nothing but the feeling of an increase in perfection," explains Leibniz. But these words could easily have been lifted from Spinoza's Ethics. The more "active" a monad is—which is to say, the more it realizes its own nature, as opposed to submitting passively to the domination of other monads—the happier it is. "We will be happier the clearer our comprehension of things and the more we act in accordance with our proper nature, namely, reason," Leibniz clarifies. "Only to the extent that our reasonings are correct are we free and exempt from the passions which are impressed upon us by surrounding bodies." It is pas-sages like this one—which, again, could simply have been cribbed from the Ethics—that lead Russell to suggest that, in his ethical philosophy, "Leibniz no longer shows great originality, but tends, with slight alterations of phraseology, to adopt (without acknowledgment) the views of the decried Spinoza." In fact, Leibniz's unswerving commitment to the guidance of reason leads him inexorably toward the identification of freedom and happiness that is the defining feature of Spinoza's ethics.
IN THEIR REPORTS on their travels into the very heart of things, Leibniz and Spinoza seem at first glance to describe radically different universes. One discovers a numberless horde of animated substances, the other a singular mass of undifferentiated substance; one finds souls that never die, the other no souls at all; one sees a world in which everything happens for a reason, the other a world in which everything just happens. Yet, when we look for observable effects and practical conse-quences that might serve to distinguish the two worlds in question, the discrepancies seem to evaporate upon inspection. The world according to Leibniz is a reasonable one; it is a law-abiding, all-determining cosmos that is the proper subject of scientific investiga-tion, a world unencumbered with inscrutable• deities, where the individual remains for all practical purposes at the mercy of external forces, and in which we have the responsibility to seek happiness by realizing ourselves. The world Leibniz describes, in brief, is the one first properly observed by Spinoza. Ultimately, the differences between the two philosophers have to do not with the nature of the world as each sees it, but with the mean-ing or value each ascribes to it. Spinoza identifies the law-abiding, all-determining nature that serves as the object of scientific investigation with God. Leibniz does not. Indeed, Leibniz's philosophy is at its clear-est and most sincere in the negative. Its founding principle remains: Nature is not God; that is to say, a Being that makes no choices and cannot be called good does not deserve the name of God. The mon-ads exist for no other purpose than to make this negation, which remains standing even as the rest of Leibniz's philosophy collapses into something observationally indistinguishable from Spinozism. In this there is revealed something essential about the nature of Leibniz's philosophy and its peculiar relationship with that of Spinoza. The monadology is best understood as an attempt to show that one may grant the existence of a universe in every way indistinguishable from the one Spinoza describes and still cling to old hopes about God and immortality on the basis that these matters lie beyond the limits of anything that can be observed or proved by Spinoza and his ilk. Leibniz's avowed proof of the immateriality of the mind is really just an argument that Spinoza's materialism does not rule out the possibil-ity of an undetectable spiritual force behind all apparently mechanical actions; his proof of the pre-established harmony is just an argument that the parallelism Spinoza observes can never be definitively shown to be the result of an identity, rather than mere coincidence; his proof that the world has a designer is just an argument that Spinoza fails to prove absolutely that there is none; and his proof of the existence of a transcendent God is really just an argument that an immanent God is not a God. Leibniz's philosophy as a whole follows the pattern he established as a young man in his early defense of transubstantiation. In the final analysis, he does not leave us with a set of positive doc-trines, but with a series of negations. His work amounts to a decon-struction of modern philosophy in general and of Spinozism in particular. It is defined by—and cannot exist without—that to which it is opposed. It is, in essence, a reactive philosophy. Perhaps the best way to summarize Leibniz's problematically self-subverting position is to say that he was a Spinozist who did not believe in Spinoza's God. One logical outcome of such a position, of course, is precisely that toward which Leibniz tended whenever he attempted to distinguish himself from Spinoza: namely, that there is no God at all. The author of the system of the pre-established harmony spent a lifetime branding the author of the Ethics as an atheist; but it was Leibniz who sailed much closer to the winds of unbelief. All of which puts us in a better position to understand in general terms what transpired on those windy days in November 1676—even if the details of the event must remain forever beyond our knowledge. In a philosophical as well as a literal sense, Spinoza opened a door for Leibniz. He revealed to his visitor a reality that, for all practical purposes, the young man recognized as the world within which he situated his own philosophy. In frank and sometimes bru-tal language, he showed Leibniz what it means to be a modern philosopher. Yet Leibniz did not behold this reality in the same way that Spinoza did. When he 1poked into the black opal eyes of his host, he did not find a new divinity. He saw instead the death of God. His philosophy was in many respects an attempt to shut the door that he wished he had never opened. But it was too late: he was already standing on the other side.

The Rubicon

Sometime around 10 January 49 BCE, Julius Caesar, with just one of his legions from Gaul, crossed the Rubicon, the river that marked the northern boundary of Italy. The exact date is not known, nor even the location of this most historically significant of rivers. It was more likely a small brook than the raging torrent of popular imagination, and – despite the efforts of ancient writers to embellish them with dramatic appearances of the gods, uncanny omens and prophetic dreams – the reality of the surroundings was probably mundane. For us, ‘to cross the Rubicon’ has come to mean ‘to pass the point of no return’. It did not mean that to Caesar.
According to one of his companions on the journey – Gaius Asinius Pollio, historian, senator and founder of Rome’s first public library – when he finally approached the Rubicon after some hesitation, Caesar quoted in Greek two words from the Athenian comic playwright Menander: literally, in a phrase borrowed from gambling, ‘Let the dice be thrown.’ Despite the usual English translation – ‘The die is cast’, which again appears to hint at the irrevocable step being taken – Caesar’s Greek was much more an expression of uncertainty, a sense that everything now was in the lap of the gods. Let’s throw the dice in the air and see where they will fall! Who knows what will happen next?
What did happen next was four years of civil war. Some of Caesar’s supporters in Rome rushed to join him in northern Italy, while Pompey was pushed into the command of the ‘anti-Caesarians’ and decided to leave Italy and fight from his power base in the East. In 48 BCE his forces were defeated at the Battle of Pharsalus in northern Greece, and Pompey was murdered soon after, when he tried to take refuge in Egypt. But despite his famed speed (celeritas was one of his watchwords), Caesar still took three more years, until 45 BCE, to overcome his Roman adversaries in Africa and Spain, as well as to squash trouble from Pharnaces, the son and usurper of Mithradates. Between crossing the Rubicon and his death in March 44 BCE, Caesar made only fleeting visits to Rome; the longest was the five-month stretch from October 45 BCE. From the point of view of the city, he became a largely absent dictator.
In some ways, this civil war between Pompey and Caesar was as odd as the Social War. How many people it directly involved is impossible to say. The priority of many of the inhabitants of Italy, and of the empire, was probably to avoid getting inadvertently caught up in the struggles of rival armies and to keep clear of the crime wave that the war unleashed in Italy.

and

Julius Caesar was murdered on 15 March 44 BCE, the Ides on the Roman dating system. In parts of the Mediterranean world the civil war had by no means ended. Pompey’s son Sextus still had a force of at least six legions in Spain and was continuing to fight for his father’s cause. But Caesar was mustering a vast force of almost 100,000 soldiers for an attack on the Parthian Empire, a revenge for the ignominious defeat of Crassus at Carrhae and a useful opportunity for military glory against a foreign rather than a Roman enemy. It was just a few days before he was due to leave for the East, on 18 March, that a group of twenty or so disgruntled senators, supported actively or passively by a few dozen more, killed him.
Appropriately, the deed took place in a new senate house, which Pompey had built into his new theatre complex, in front of a statue of himself, which ended up splattered with Caesar’s blood. Thanks in part to the reworking of the theme in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the murder of the Roman dictator in the name of libertas has been the template for last-ditch opposition to tyranny and for principled assassination ever since. It was no coincidence, for example, that John Wilkes Booth used ‘Ides’ as the code for the day on which he planned to kill Abraham Lincoln. But as a backwards glance through Roman history shows, this was the last in a series of murders of popular, radical but arguably too powerful politicians that started with the lynching of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE. The question must be: what was Caesar trying to do and what made him so unacceptable to this group of senators that assassination seemed the only way out?
Despite his rare appearances in Rome, Caesar initiated a vast programme of reforms going beyond even the scale of Sulla’s. One of them governs life even now. For – with some help from the specialist scientists he met in Alexandria – Caesar introduced into Rome what has become the modern Western system of timekeeping. The traditional Roman year was only 355 days long, and it had for centuries been the job of Roman priests to add in an extra month from time to time to keep the civic calendar in step with the natural seasons. For whatever reason – probably a combination of lack of expertise and lack of will – they had signally failed to get their calculations correct. The result was that the calendar year and the natural year were sometimes many weeks apart, with the Roman equivalent of harvest festivals falling when the crops were still growing and the climate in what was called April feeling more like February (which it was). The truth is that it is always dangerous in Republican history to assume that any given date is an accurate indication of the weather. Using Alexandrian know-how, Caesar corrected the error and, for the future, established a year with 365 days, with an extra day inserted at the end of February every four years. This was a far more significant outcome of his visit to Egypt than any dalliance with Cleopatra.
Other measures harked back to familiar themes from the previous hundred years. Caesar launched, for example, a large number of new overseas colonies to resettle the poor from the city of Rome, following up Gaius Gracchus’ initiative with a successful foundation at Carthage. It was this, presumably, that allowed him to get away with reducing the number of recipients of free grain by about half, to 150,000 in all. He also extended Roman citizenship to those living in the far north of Italy, beyond the river Po, and at least proposed granting Latin status to the population of Sicily. But he had even more ambitious plans to overhaul Roman government, including attempts to regularise – even micromanage – all kinds of aspects of civic organisation, both in Rome and throughout Italy. These ranged from questions of who could hold office in local Italian communities (no gravediggers, pimps, actors or auctioneers unless they were retired) to issues of road maintenance (householders to be responsible for the footpath in front of their house) and traffic management (no heavy-goods vehicles in Rome during the daytime except for the purposes of temple building or repair, or for removing demolition rubble).
Caesar also became part of the calendar, as well as rewriting it. It may not have been until after his assassination that the month Quintilis was renamed Julius, our July, after him; Roman writers do not always make the chronology clear. But it was overweening honours of that sort, voted during his lifetime by a compliant senate, combined with his more or less official takeover of the democratic processes that provoked the deadly opposition. This went far beyond his head on the coinage. He was allowed to wear triumphal dress almost wherever he liked, including the triumphal laurel wreath, which he found convenient for disguising his bald patch. Temples and a priesthood in his honour seem to have been promised too, and his statue was placed in all the existing temples of Rome. His private house was even to be decorated with a triangular gable (or pediment), to give it the appearance of a temple, the home of a god.

Huxley on the Mormon and Baroque music

Faith, Taste, and History
Among tall stories, surely one of the tallest is the history of Mormonism. A founder whose obviously homemade revela-tions were accepted as more-than-gospel truth by thousands of followers; a lieutenant and successor who was "for daring a Cromwell, for intrigue a Machiavelli, for executive force a Moses, and for utter lack of conscience a Bonaparte"; a body of doctrine combining the most penetrating psychological insights with preposterous history and absurd metaphysics; a society of puritanical but theater-going and music-loving polygamists; a chuch once condemned by the Supreme Court as an organized rebellion, but now a monolith of respectability; a passionately loyal membership distinguished, even in these middle years of the twentieth century, by the old-fashioned Protestant and pioneering virtues of self-reliance and mutual aid—together, these make up a tale which no self-respecting reader even of Spillane, even of science fiction, should be asked to swallow. And yet, in spite of its total lack of plausibility, the tale happens to be true. My book knowledge of its truth had been acquired long since and intermittently kept up to date. It was not, however, until the spring of 1953 that I had occasion actually to see and touch the concrete evidences of that strange history. We had driven all day in torrential rain, sometimes even in untimely snow, across Nevada. Hour after hour in the vast blankness of desert plains, past black bald mountains that suddenly closed in through the driving rain, to recede again, after a score of wintry miles, into the gray distance. At the state line the weather had cleared for a little, and there below us, unearthly in a momentary gleam of sunshine, lay the Great Salt Desert of Utah, snow-white between the nearer crags, with the line of blue or inky peaks rising, far off, from the opposite shore of that dry ghost of an inland sea. There was another storm as we entered Salt Lake City, and it was through sheets of falling water that we caught our firs glimpse, above the chestnut trees, of a flood-lit object quite as difficult to believe in, despite the evidence of our senses, as the strange history it commemorates. The improbability of this greatest of the Mormon Temples does not consist in its astounding ugliness. Most Victorian churches are astoundingly ugly. It consists in a certain combination of oddity, dullness and monumentality unique, so far as I know, in the annals of architecture. For the most part Victorian buildings are more or less learned pastiches of something else—something Gothic, some-thing Greek or nobly Roman, something Elizabethan or Flamboyant Flemish or even vaguely Oriental. But this Temple looks like nothing on earth—looks like nothing on earth and yet contrives to be completely unoriginal, utterly and uniformly prosaic. But whereas most of the churches built during the past century are gimcrack affairs of brick veneered with imitation stone, of lattice work plastered to look like masonry, this vast essay in eccentric dreariness was realized, from crypt to capstone, in the solidest of granite. Its foundations are cyclopean, its walls are three yards thick. Like the Escorial, like the Great Pyramid, it was built to last indefinitely. Long after the rest of Victorian and twentieth-century architecture shall have crumbled back to dust, this thing will be standing in the Western desert, an object, to the neo-neolithic savages of post-atomic times, of uncomprehending reverence and superstitious alarm.

To what extent are the arts conditioned by, or indebted to, religion? And is there, at any given moment of history, a common socio-psychological source that gives to the various arts—music and painting, architecture and sculpture—some kind of common tendency? In 1853, when the Temple's foundation stone was laid, London could boast its Crystal Palace, could look back complacently on its Exhibition of the marvels of Early Victorian technology. But here in Utah men were still living in the Dark Ages—without roads, without towns, with no means of communication faster than the ox wagon or mule train, without industry, without machines, without tools more elaborate than saws and scythes and hammers—and with precious few even of those. The granite blocks of which the Temple is built were quarried by man power, dressed by man power, hauled over twenty miles of trackless desert by man power and ox power, hoisted into position by man power. Like the cathedrals of medieval Europe the Temple is a monument, among other things, to the strength and heroic endurance of striped muscle.
. Against enormous odds, a great cathedral was built in the wilderness. Alas, instead of Bourges or Canterbury, it was This.
FAITH, TASTE, AND HISTORY 209 Faith, it is evident, may be relied on to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation. There is, however, no guarantee that it will produce good art. Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable. Religious art is sometimes excellent, sometimes atrocious; and the excellence is not necessarily associated with fervor nor the atrocity with lukewarmness. Thus, at the turn of our era, Buddhism flourished in Northwestern India. Piety, to judge by the large number of surviving monuments, ran high; but artistic merit ran pretty low. Or consider Hindu art. For the last three centuries it has been astonishingly feeble. Have the many varieties of Hinduism been taken less seriously than in the times when Indian art was in its glory? There is not the slightest reason to believe it. Similarly there is not the slightest reason to believe that Catholic fervor was less intense in the age of the Mannerists than it had been three generations earlier. On the contrary, there is good reason to believe that, during the Counter-Reformation, Catholicism was taken more seriously by more people than at any time since the fourteenth century. But the bad Catholicism of the High Renaissance produced superb religious art; the good Catholicism of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced a great deal of rather bad religious art. Turning now to the individual artist—and after all, there is no such thing as "Art," there are only men at work—we find that the creators of religious masterpieces are sometimes, like Fra Angelico, extremely devout, sometimes no more than conventionally orthodox, sometimes (like Perugino, the supreme exponent of pietism in art) active and open disbelievers. For the artist in his professional capacity, religion is important because it offers him a wealth of interesting subject matter and many opportunities to exercise his skill. Upon the quality of his production it has little or no influence. The excellence of a work of religious art depends on two factors, neither of which has anything to do with religion. It depends primarily on the presence in the artist of certain tendencies, sensibilities and talents; and, secondarily, it depends on the earlier history of his chosen art, and on what may be called the logic of its formal relations. At any given moment that internal logic points toward conclusions beyond those which have been reached by the majority of contemporary artists. A recognition of this fact may impel certain artists—especially young artists—to try to realize those possible conclusions in concrete actuality. Sometimes these attempts are fully successful; sometimes, in spite of their author's talents, they fail. In either case, the outcome does not depend on the nature of
 the artist's metaphysical beliefs, nor on the warmth with which he entertains them. The Mormons had faith, and their faith enabled them to realize a prodigious ideal—the building of a Temple in the wilderness. But though faith can move mountains, it cannot of itself shape those mountains into cathedrals. It will activate muscle, but has no power to create architectural talent where none exists. Still less can it alter the facts of artistic history and the internal logic of forms. For a great variety of reasons, some sociological and some intrinsically aesthetic, some easily discernible and others obscure, the traditions of the European arts and crafts had disintegrated, by the middle years of the nineteenth century, into a chaos of fertile bad taste and ubiquitous vulgarity. In their fervor, in the intensity of their concern with metaphysical problems, in their readiness to embrace the most eccentric beliefs and practices, the Mormons, like their contemporaries in a hundred Christian, Socialist or Spiritualist communities, belonged to the Age of the Gnostics. In everything else they were typical products of rustic nineteenth-century America. And in the field of the plastic arts nineteenth-century America, especially rustic America, was worse off even than nineteenth-century Europe.

How strange, I found myself reflecting, as the glutinous tide washed over me, how strange that people should listen with apparently equal enjoyment to this kind of thing and the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major. Or had I got hold of the wrong end of the stick? Perhaps mine was the strange, the essentially abnormal attitude. Perhaps there was some-thing wrong with a listener who found it difficult to adore both these warblings around a hymn tune and the Prelude and Fugue. From these unanswerable questions my mind wandered to others, hardly less puzzling, in the domain of history. Here was this huge instrument. In its original and already monu-mental state, it was a product of pioneering faith. An Austral-ian musician and early Mormon convert, Joseph Ridges, had furnished the design and supervised the work. The timber used for making the pipes was hauled by oxen from forests three hundred miles to the south. The intricate machinery of a great organ was home-made by local craftsmen. When the work was finished, what kind of music, one wonders, was played to the Latter-day Saints assembled in the tabernacle? Hymns, of course, in profusion. But also Handel, also Haydn and Mozart, also Mendelssohn and perhaps even a few pieces by that queer old fellow whom Mendelssohn had resurrected, John Sebastian Bach. It is one of the paradoxes of history that the people who built the monstrosities of the Victorian epoch should have been the same as the people who applauded, in their hideous halls and churches, such masterpieces of orderliness and un-affected grandeur as The Messiah, and who preferred to all his contemporaries that most elegantly classical of the moderns, Felix Mendelssohn. Popular taste in one field may be more or less completely at variance with popular taste outside that field. Still more surprisingly, the fundamental tendencies of professionals in one of the arts may be at variance with the fundamental tendencies of professionals in other arts. Until very recently the music of the fifteenth, sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was, to all but learned special-ists, almost completely unknown. Now, thanks to long-playing phonograph records, more and more of this buried treasure is coming to the surface. The interested amateur is at last in a position to hear for himself what, before, he could only read about. He knows, for example, what people were singing when Botticelli was painting "Venus and Mars"; what Van Eyck might have heard in the way of love songs and polyphonic masses; what kind of music was being sung or played in St. Mark's while Tintoretto and Veronese were at work, next door, in the Doge's Palace; what developments were taking place in the sister art during the more than sixty years of Bernini's career as sculptor and architect. Dunstable and Dufay, Ockeghem and Josquin, Lassus, Palestrina, Victoria—their overlapping lives cover the whole of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Music, in those two centuries, underwent momentous changes. The dissonances of the earlier, Gothic polyphony were reduced to universal consonance; the various artifices—imitation, diminution, aug-mentation and the rest—were perfected and, by the greater masters, used to create rhythmical patterns of incredible subtlety and richness. But through the whole period virtually all serious music retained those open-ended, free-floating forms which it had inherited from the Gregorian Chant and, more remotely, from some Oriental ancestor. European folk music was symmetrical, four-square, with regular returns to the same starting point and balanced phrases, as in metrical poetry, of pre-established and foreseeable length. Based upon plain chant and written, for the part, as a setting to the litur-gical texts, learned music was analogous, not to scanned verse, but to prose. It was a music without bars—that is to say, with no regularity of emphasis. Its component elements were of different lengths, there were no returns to recognizable starting points, and its geometrical analogue was not some closed figure like the square or circle, but an open curve undulating away to infinity. That such a music ever reached a close was due, not to the internal logic of its forms, but solely to the fact that even the longest liturgical texts come at last to their Amen. Some attempt to supply a purely musical reason for not going on forever was made by those composers who wrote their masses around a cantus firmus---a melody borrowed, almost invariably, from the closed, symmetrical music of popular songs. Sung or played in very slow time, and hidden in the tenor, sometimes even in the bass, the cantus firmus was, for all practical purposes, inaudible. It existed for the benefit, not of listeners, but of the composer; not to remind bored church-goers of what they had heard last night in the tavern, but to serve a strictly artistic purpose. Even when the cantus firmus was present, the general effect of unconditioned, free-floating continuousness persisted. But, for the composer, the task of organization had been made easier; for, buried within the fluid heart of the music, was the unbending armature of a fully metrical song. While Dufay was still a choir boy at Cambrai, Ghiberti was at work on the bronze doors of Santa Maria del Fiore, the young Donatello had been given his first commissions. And when Victoria, the last and greatest of the Roman masters, died in 1613, Lorenzo Bernini was already a full-blown infant prodigy. From Early Renaissance to Baroque, the fundamental tendency of the plastic arts was through symmetry and beyond it, away from closed forms toward unbalanced openness and the implication of infinity. In music, during this same period, the fundamental tendency was through openness and beyond it, away from floating contin-uousness toward meter, toward four-square symmetry, toward regular and foreseeable recurrence. It was in Venice that the two opposite tendencies, of painting and of music, first became conspicuous. While Tintoretto and Veronese moved toward openness and the asymmetrical, the two Ga-brielis moved, in their motets and their instrumental music, toward harmony, toward regular scansion and the closed form. In Rome, Palestrina and Victoria continued to work in the old free-floating style. At St. Mark's, the music of the future—the music which in due course was to develop into the music of Purcell and Couperin, of Bach and Handel—was in process of being born. By the sixteen-thirties, when even sculpture had taken wing for the infinite, Bernini's older contemporary, Heinrich Schuetz, the pupil of Giovanni Gabrieli, was writing (not always, but every now and then) symmetrical music that sounds almost like Bach. For some odd reason this kind of music has recently been labeled "baroque." The choice of this nickname is surely un-fortunate. If Bernini and his Italian, German and Austrian followers are baroque artists (and they have been so designated for many years), then there is no justification, except in the fact that they happened to be living at the same time, for applying the same epithet to composers, whose fundamental tendencies in regard to form were radically different from theirs. About the only seventeenth-century composer to whom the term "baroque" can be applied in the same sense as we apply it to Bernini, is Claudio Monteverdi. In his operas and his religious music, there are passages in which Monteverdi com-bines the openness and boundlessness of the older polyphony with a new expressiveness. The feat is achieved by setting an unconditionally soaring melody to an accompaniment, not of other voices, but of variously colored chords. The so-called baroque composers are baroque (in the established sense of the word) only in their desire for a more direct and dramatic expression of feeling. To realize this desire, they developed modulation within a fully tonal system, they exchanged polyphony for harmony, they varied the tempo of their music and the volume of its sound, and they invented modern orchestration. In this concern with expressiveness they were akin to their contemporaries in the fields of painting and sculpture. But in their desire for squareness, closedness and symmetry they were poles apart from men whose first wish was to overthrow the tyranny of centrality, to break out of the cramping frame or niche, to transcend the merely finite and the all too human. Between 1598 and 1680—the years of Bernini's birth and death—baroque painting and sculpture moved in one direction, baroque music, as it is miscalled, moved in another, almost opposite direction. The only conclusion we can draw is that the internal logic and the recent history of the art in which a man is working exercise a more powerful influence upon him than do the social, religious and political events of the time in which he lives. Fifteenth-century sculptors and painters inherited a tradition of symmetry and closedness. Fifteenth-century composers inherited a tradition of openness and asymmetry. On either side the intrinsic logic of the forms was worked out to its ultimate conclusion. By the end of the sixteenth century neither the musical nor the plastic artists could go any further along the roads they had been following. Going beyond themselves, the painters and sculptors pursued the path of open-ended asymmetry, the free-floating musicians turned to the exploration of regular recurrence and the closed form. Meanwhile the usual wars and persecutions and sectarian throat-cuttings were in full swing; there were economic revolutions, political and social revolutions, revolutions in science and technology. But these merely historical events seem to have affected artists only materially—by ruining them or making their fortunes, by giving or withholding the opportunity to display their skill, by changing the social or religious status of potential patrons. Their thought and feeling, their fundamental artistic tendencies were reactions to events of a totally different order—events not in the social world, but in the special universe of each man's chosen art. Take Schuetz, for example. Most of his adult life was spent in running away from the recurrent horrors of the Thirty Years' War. But the changes and chances of a discontinuous existence left no corresponding traces upon his work. Whether at Dresden or in Italy, in Denmark or at Dresden again, he went on drawing the artistically logical conclusions from the premises formulated under Gabrieli at Venice and gradually modified, through the years, by his own successive achievements and the achievements of his contemporaries and juniors. Man is a whole, but a whole with an astounding capacity for living, simultaneously or successively, in water-tight compartments. What happens here has little or no effect on what happens there. The seventeenth-century taste for closed forms in music was inconsistent with the seventeenth-century taste for asymmetry and openness in the plastic arts. The Victorian taste for Mendelssohn and Handel was inconsistent with the Victorian taste for Mormon Temples, Albert Halls and St. Pancras Railway Stations. But in fact these mutually exclusive tastes coexisted and had no perceptible effect on one another. Consistency is a verbal criterion, which cannot be applied to the phenomena of life. Taken together, the various activities
FAITH, TASTE, AND HISTORY 215 of a single individual may "make no sense," and yet be per-fectly compatible with biological survival, social success and personal happiness. Objective time is the same for every member of a human group and, within each individual, for each inhabitant of a watertight compartment. But the self in one compartment does not necessarily have the same Zeitgeist as the selves in other compartments or as the selves in whom other individuals do their equally inconsistent living. When the stresses of history are at a maximum, men and women tend to react to them in the same way. For example, if their country is involved in war, most individuals become heroic and self-sacrificing. And if the war produces famine and pestilence, most of them die. But where the historical pressures are more moderate, individuals are at liberty, within rather wide limits, to react to them in different ways. We are always synchronous with ourselves and others; but it often happens that we are not contemporary with either. At Logan, for example, in the shadow of another Temple, whose battlemented turrets gave it the air of an Early Victorian "folly," of a backdrop to Edmund Kean in Richard HI, we got into conversation with a charming contemporary, not of Harry Emerson Fosdick or Bishop Barnes, but of Brother Juniper—a Mormon whose faith had all the fervor, all the unqualified literalness, of peasant faith in the thirteenth century. He talked to us at length about the weekly baptisms of the dead. Fifteen hundred of them baptized by proxy every Saturday evening and thus, at long last, admitted to that heaven where all the family ties persist throughout the aeons. To a member of a generation brought up on Freud, these posthumous prospects seemed a bit forbidding. Not so to Brother Juniper. He spoke of them with a kind of quiet rapture. And how celestially beautiful, in his eyes, was this cyclopean gazebo! How inestimable the privilege, which he had earned, of being allowed to pass through its doors! Doors forever closed to all Gentiles and even to a moiety of the Latter-day Saints. Around that heavenly Temple the lilac trees were in full scent and the mountains that ringed the fertile valley were white with the snowy symbol of divine purity. But time pressed. We left Brother Juniper to his paradise and drove on.

Blowing Bubbles

Edgar de Gas (he was not yet spelling his name Degas when they met in eth Louvre in 1862) was painting portraits including one of Manet and his wife Suzanne in 1866 showing Manet lounging in a fit of boredom as his wife plays the piano. If this likeness was unflattering, the one of Suzanne must have been far worse, since Manet took such exception to Degas' depiction of his wife that he took a knife to the canvas and expurgated her face and hands. Degas was enraged by this act of vandalism, and for several months the two men had refused to speak. The rift was soon healed, however: Degas claimed that "one cannot stay vexed with Manet for very long." And shortly after their reconciliation, Degas seems to have fours Manet's fifteen-year-old godson employment at the Banque de Gas. d Leon Koella was not living in the apartment in the Rue de Saint-Petersbourg that Manet and Suzanne were sharing with his mother. More modest lodgings had been found for him in a ground-floor flat in the building next door. Manet paid frequent visits to the boy, and most evenings the pair of them competed at games of backgammon and bezique. Leon had posed for his godfather on a number of occasions, most recently as the young dandy in View of the Univer-sal Exposition of z86:7. He was, in fact, Manet's favorite model, ultimately pos-ing for him more times even than Victorine Meurent, which suggests that Manet, who always feared being let down by his models, found the boy a com-pliant sitter. Therefore, when a new idea for a painting came to him in the weeks following Baudelaire's death, he naturally turned to Leon; and in be-tween running his errands at the Banque de Gas, the boy therefore found him-self in the studio in the Rue Guyot, blowing soap bubbles. Soap bubbles had long been a source of fascination to scientists and artists alike. Even as Manet was painting his canvas, a Belgian physicist named Joseph-Antoine-Ferdinand Plateau was dipping wire frameworks into tubs of soapy water in an attempt to describe the geometrical properties of bubbles, in-cluding the precise angles at which they clustered together.' Manet's interest in soap bubbles, like that of most artists, was rather different. The soap bubble had been used for several centuries in what was known as a vanitas, a painting whose purpose was to remind viewers (through symbols such as skulls, time-pieces and snuffed-out candles and lanterns) of the vanity and brevity of earthly life. With its intimations of the evanescence of life and inevitability of death, Manet's Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles faithfully followed this genre. Never-theless, if Manet was brooding on death and extinction, he also perhaps kept a shrewd eye on his artistic career. Executed with a careful brushwork, Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles was a beautiful and inoffensive painting of the sort beloved by Salon juries and art collectors alike.

Crassus etc.

The Gang of Three

In 60 BCE, two years after he had returned to Rome, Pompey was frustrated that the senate had not yet formally ratified his eastern settlement, instead procrastinating by confirming it piece by piece, not en bloc. And, as any general then had to do, he was looking for land on which to settle his ex-soldiers. Marcus Licinius Crassus, who had finally led Roman troops to victory against Spartacus and was reputedly the richest man in Rome, had recently taken up the case of a struggling company of state contractors. They had bid far too much for the tax rights of the province of Asia, and Crassus was trying to get them permission to renegotiate the price. Julius Caesar, the least experienced, and least wealthy, of the three, wanted to secure election to the consulship of 59 BCE and a major military command to follow, not merely the policing duties against brigands in Italy that the senate had in mind for him. Mutual support seemed the best way to achieve these various aims. So, in an entirely unofficial deal, they pooled resources, power, contacts and ambition to get what they wanted in the short term – and in the longer.
For many ancient observers this was another milestone on the road to the breakdown of Republican government. The poet Horace, looking back from the other side of that breakdown, was only one of those who singled out the year 60 BCE, when he referred, according to traditional Roman dating, to ‘the civil war that began when Metellus was consul’. ‘Cato the Younger’ – the great grandson of ‘the Elder’ (p. 204) and one of Caesar’s most uncompromising enemies – argued that the city was overturned not when Caesar and Pompey fell out but when they became friends. The idea that the political process had been fixed behind the scenes seemed in some ways worse than the open violence of the previous decades. Cicero captured the point nicely when he observed that in Pompey’s notebook there was a list not only of past consuls but of future ones too.
It was not such a complete takeover as those comments imply. There were all kinds of strains, disagreements and rivalries between the three men, and if Pompey really did have a notebook with a list of the gang’s choice of future consuls, the electoral process sometimes got the better of them and someone quite different, not at all to their liking, was voted in. Nonetheless, they did pull off their immediate goals. Caesar was duly elected consul for 59 BCE and, among a series of measures that strongly resembled the programmes of earlier, radical tribunes, sponsored legislation on behalf of the other two. He also secured a military command for himself in southern Gaul, to which a vast area on the other side of the Alps was soon added.
For much of the 50s BCE, the machinations of members of the gang continued to be a major force in Roman politics, even though Caesar made only periodic visits to Italy and Crassus never returned from the campaign he led in 55 BCE against the Parthian Empire, centred in what is now Iran, which in many ways replaced Mithradates in Roman fears. It is partly Crassus’ early death that makes his role and importance within the trio difficult to assess. But the tragedy of his defeat and gory decapitation, and the humiliation of the capture of his army’s ceremonial standards, resonated for years. The decisive Parthian victory came in 53 BCE at the Battle of Carrhae, on what is now the border between Turkey and Syria. Crassus’ head was sent as a trophy to the Parthian king’s residence, where it was instantly reused as a prop, standing in for the head of the tragic Pentheus, decapitated by his mother, in a performance of Euripides’ play The Bacchae (interestingly part of the Parthian repertoire). The standards remained a proud piece of Parthian booty until the emperor Augustus, by some adept diplomacy dressed up as a military achievement, brought them back to Rome in 19 BCE.
The controversies of this period in the mid first century BCE are documented in vivid microdetail, thanks largely to the letters of Cicero, sometimes written daily and full of unsubstantiated rumours, second-guessing, hints of plots, half-truths, gossip, unreliable speculation and foreboding. ‘The political situation alarms me more each day’ and ‘There is a whiff of dictatorship in the air’ are typical refrains, among more practical exchanges about loans and debts or triumphalist news of Caesar’s daring, if very temporary, landing on Britain. They offer extraordinary evidence for politics as it happened that is unique in the classical world, and probably in any world before the fifteenth century CE. Yet they also tend to exaggerate the impression of confusion and political breakdown, or at least present a picture that is hard to compare with earlier periods. How disordered and cut-throat might the world of Scipio Africanus and Fabius Cunctator appear had their private letters and jottings survived rather than just the retrospective accounts of Livy and others? What is more, the overwhelming quantity of material from Cicero’s pen can make it hard to see beyond his perspectives and prejudices.
The career of Publius Clodius Pulcher is a case in point. Clodius first crossed swords with Cicero in a scandal at the end of 62 BCE, after a man was discovered in what was supposed to be a solemn, all-female religious festival being led by Julius Caesar’s wife. Some suspected that this was a lovers’ tryst rather than a simple prank, and Caesar took the precaution of a speedy divorce, on the famous grounds that ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion’. Many pointed the finger of blame at Clodius, who was put on trial, with Cicero appearing as a key witness for the prosecution. The upshot was an acquittal and lasting enmity between Clodius and Cicero – who predictably, but possibly wrongly, claimed that massive bribery had secured the verdict of not guilty.
Clodius’ subsequent reputation for outright villainy has been almost entirely formed by Cicero’s enmity.

Gaius Gracchus

Gaius Gracchus

In one of the Roman world’s most quoted jibes, the satirist Juvenal, writing at the end of the first century CE, turned his scorn on the ‘mob of Remus’, which – he claimed – wanted just two things: ‘bread and circuses’ (panem et circenses). As the currency of that phrase even now shows, it was a brilliant dismissal of the limited horizons of the urban rabble, presented here as if they were the descendants of the murdered twin: they cared for nothing but the chariot racing and food handouts with which the emperors had bribed, and effectively depoliticised, them. It was also a cynical misrepresentation of the Roman tradition of providing staple food for the people at state expense, which originated with Tiberius’ younger brother Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, a tribune of the people in two consecutive years, 123 and 122 BCE.
Gaius did not introduce a ‘corn dole’. To be precise, he successfully proposed a law to the Plebeian Assembly establishing that the state should sell a certain quantity of grain each month at a subsidised, fixed price to individual citizens in the city. Even so, the scale and ambition of this initiative were enormous. And Gaius seems to have planned the considerable infrastructure needed to support it: the public purchasing, distribution facilities and some form of identity checking (how otherwise did you restrict it to citizens?), as well as storage in new public warehouses built by the Tiber and rented lock-up space in others. How the whole operation was staffed and organised day to day is not known for certain. Public officials at Rome were given only the skeletal support of a few scribes, messengers and bodyguards. So, as with most of the state’s responsibilities – right down to such tiny specialist jobs as repainting the face of the statue of the god Jupiter in his temple overlooking the city from the Capitoline Hill – much of the work of managing and distributing the grain was presumably in the hands of private contractors, who made money out of delivering public services.
Gaius’ initiative came partly out of concern for the poor in the city. In good years the crops of Sicily and Sardinia would have been more or less sufficient to feed a quarter of a million people – a reasonable, though slightly conservative, estimate for the population of Rome in the later second century BCE. But ancient Mediterranean harvests fluctuated dramatically, and prices sometimes went far beyond what many ordinary Romans – shopkeepers, craftsmen, day labourers – could afford. Even before Gaius, the state had sometimes taken preemptive measures to avoid famine in the city. One revealing inscription found in Thessaly in northern Greece records the visit of a Roman official in 129 BCE. He had come, cap in hand, ‘because the situation in his country at the present time is one of dearth’, and he went away with the promise of more than 3,000 tonnes of wheat and some very complicated transportation arrangements in place. Charitable
aims, however, were not the only thing in Gaius’ mind, nor even the hard-headed logic, sometimes in evidence at Rome, that a hungry populace was a dangerous one. His plan also had an underlying political agenda about the sharing of the state’s resources. That certainly is the point of a reported exchange between Gaius and one of his most implacable opponents, the wealthy ex-consul Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi (his last name, appropriately enough, means ‘stingy’). After the law had been passed, Gaius spotted Frugi standing in line for his allocation of grain and asked him why he was there, since he so disapproved of the measure. ‘I’m not keen, Gracchus,’ he replied, ‘on you getting the idea of sharing out my property man by man, but if that’s what you’re going to do, I’ll take my cut.’ He was presumably turning Gaius’ rhetoric back on him. The debate was about who had a claim on the property of the state and where the boundary lay between private and public wealth.
The distribution of cheap grain was Gaius’ most influential reform. Though it was amended and occasionally suspended over the decades that followed, its basic principle lasted for centuries: Rome was the only place in the ancient Mediterranean where the state took responsibility for the regular basic food supplies of its citizens. The Greek world, by contrast, had usually relied on occasional handouts in times of shortage, or sporadic displays of generosity on the part of the rich. But food distributions were only one of Gaius’ many innovations.
Unlike all earlier Roman reformers, Gaius sponsored not just a single initiative but a dozen or so. He was the first politician in the city, leaving aside the mythical founding fathers, to have an extensive and coherent programme, with measures that covered such things as the right of appeal against the death penalty, the outlawing of bribery and a much more ambitious scheme of land distribution than Tiberius had ever proposed. This involved exporting surplus citizens en masse to ‘colonies’ not only in Italy but also, for the first time, overseas. Just a couple of decades after it had been razed and cursed, Carthage was earmarked as a new town to be resettled. But Roman memory was not so short, and this particular project was soon cancelled, even though some settlers had already emigrated there. It is impossible now to list all the legislation that Gaius proposed in just two years, still less to determine precisely what its terms and aims were. Apart from a substantial section of the text of a law governing the behaviour of Roman officials abroad and providing means of redress to those whom they abused (which we shall explore in the next chapter), the surviving evidence comes largely in the form of passing asides or much later reconstructions. But it is the range that is the key. To Gaius’ opponents, that smacked dangerously of a bid for personal power. The programme overall certainly seems to have added up to a systematic attempt to reconfigure the relationship between the people and the senate.
That is how his Greek biographer, ‘Plutarch’ (in full, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus), understood it more than two hundred years later when he singled out what must have been a flamboyant gesture by Gaius as he addressed his audiences in the Forum. Speakers before him had faced the senate house, with the audience squashed together in the small area known as the comitium just in front of it. Gaius flouted convention by strategically turning his back on the senate house when talking to the people, who now listened in the open piazza of the Forum. It was, Plutarch concedes, just a ‘slight deviation’ in practice, but it made a revolutionary point. Not only did it allow the participation of a much larger crowd; it signalled the freedom of the people from the controlling eye of the senate. Ancient writers, in fact, credit Gaius with a particularly sharp sense of the politics of place.